Pile-Raft Settlements Prediction under Coupled Static-Dynamic Loads Using Four Heuristic Regression Approaches

Abstract

One of the main driving factors for structures' evaluation is the foundation settlement. Measuring structures' settlement in field is costly especially when heavy loads are applied. Settlement prediction models can be used to avoid the high cost of settlement field tests. Four advanced heuristic regression methods are developed and applied in this study to estimate raft foundations' settlement, namely, multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS), M5 model tree (M5Tree), generalized regression neural networks (GRNN), and support vector regression (SVR) techniques. Simulation of raft pile foundations is utilized to calculate the settlements of piles under the effect of static and dynamic loads. Previous studies are compared with the newly developed models. The results show that the four models can be used to accurately predict foundations' settlements in the training stage. Also, the results reveal that the MARS and SVR models performed slightly better than the M5Tree and GRNN models in the testing stage and accordingly can be used to predict foundations' settlement. The SVR model outperformed other models when few numbers of measurements are available.